SAVING TIME
Anelys Wolf & Sebastían Preece
May - August 2024
The choice to pair works by Sebastián Preece and Anelys Wolf for the fourth exhibition at Capilla Azul came, ironically, from our awareness that their respective approaches to making art bear little outward resemblance to one another. While Wolf is dedicated to the historically contained format of representational painting, Preece’ working methods involve a more improvisational response to the physical environment in which he finds himself. As for the results, their separate methods and ideas produced equally distinct bodies of work that suggest no natural basis for comparison or assimilation. Nonetheless, Preece’s rigorous investigations into the mutability of materials, and Wolf’s narrative excursions into the past, share the essential trait of being able to induce within viewers a sensation of having been inexplicably lost in time.
Anelys Wolf
Born in Valdivia, Chile, 1974, she studied in Santiago from 1993-1996, & earned her BA in Art, Major in Painting, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile. She has been developing her career from Ancud, Chiloé Island, and from 2010 she has worked & exhibited in Europe, mostly in Paris. Anelys is the daughter of interculturality that characterizes the northern areas of Chiloé. Her mother hailed from Quinchao Island in the archipelago’s inner sea, from where, during her time as a student, she would go out on horseback, boat, and then in train to reach Ancud’s Normal School, where she was trained as an elementary school teacher. Her father, descendant of German settlers, was dedicated to agriculture and commerce. In Anelys’ paternal home in Ancud, Chiloé is spoken and felt: the rain through the window, the warmth of the fire in the wood stove. From 2012 on, she has painted uninterruptedly from Chiloé, where she reflects on local identity and the significance of belonging to a small society, in societies that lean toward a uniformity of expression.
Sebastían Preece
Preece was born, raised and currently lives in Santiago, and has long been fascinated with the natural processes of disintegration that are often featured in his work. His projects have a tendency to amplify the inherent tension between the integrity of his work’s materiality and structure, no matter how fleeting, and the proprietary interest of conventional institutions in conserving it for the future. Preece’s methodology often hinges on the simple act of displacement: he has burrowed under libraries, preserved
ruined books, salvaged concrete stoops from Hurricane Katrina, and arranged the heavily graffitied steel cell doors of a penitentiary into a suspended sculpture that transforms wherever it is shown into a physical relic of despair.
For Chiloé, Preece began by investigating nearby manmade structures that conveyed an extended sense of time, and found what he was looking for in an abandoned canoe that at first glance seemed to have been casually left aside, but on further inspection
turned out to be a finely layered composite, involving several phases, over multiple years, of construction, deterioration, patching, rebuilding, resealing, and repainting, so that the same vessel has been salvaged and reused multiple times, until nothing more could be renewed or recycled. To bring that narrative to life, Preece set about painstakingly disassembling the entire vessel by hand, in order that every piece of wood and metal might then be arranged by him in a way that transforms the utilitarian structure into a broadly aesthetic display of shape, color and texture. These fragments also stop time, but not by slowing down the deterioration. Instead they reframe it within an extended narrative of human adaptability.